Interpretive Summary: The genus Ardisia consists of more than 200 species. Several Ardisia species, such as A. crenata and A. japonica have been used as outdoor ornamental or indoor house plants because of their bright red berries, which remain attached to the plant for over a year under home environments. However, due to the long production time required to produce a commercially acceptable plant, they are no longer produced. As a part of research project to find other species or cultivars which can be economically produced, germplasm was collected from the United States, China, Japan, and Korea and was characterized using DNA fingerprinting. Because the origin of some of these plants was not known, therefore, fingerprinting was used to help characterize the accessions. A. japonica introduced from Japan which has variegated green leaves with a white margin was found to be distantly related to the A. japonica collected from Jindo, Korea which have normal green leaves. A. japonica currently marketed in Korea is closely related to the species from Jindo. Grouping of A. crenata according to geographical origin was not correlated with morphological characteristics. For example, A. crenata with red berries and variegated leaves collected from Japan was clustered together with A. crenata from Japan with white berries and normal green leaves.

Technical Abstract:
Three Ardisia species, Ardisia pusilla, Ardisia japonica, and Ardisia crenata, are native to the southern part of Korea, China, and Japan, and have been marketed as a berry bearing ornamental plant. The genetic relationships among these three native Ardisia collected from various locations in Korea, and commercially available Ardisia of unknown origin on the market, were investigated by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. Arbitrary 10-mer oligonucleotide and 12-mer oligonucleotide primers generated a total of 78 polymorphic bands ranging from 400 bp to 2,000 bp. Members of each Ardisia species were clustered together when a dendrogram was constructed using a squared euclidean distance of 10.0. A. pusilla was more closely associated with A. japonica than A. crenata. A. japonica currently marketed in floral and nursery trades was related to a native plant from Jindo, Korea. A. crenata was divided into two or three groups based on geographical origin. A. crenata plants on the market are related to those from Florida, USA, which were originally started from seeds imported from China. Molecular markers generated by RAPD analysis were successfully used to characterize genetic relationships among three species of the genus Ardisia and to characterize different accessions.